Someone managed to seize control of a large digital advertising billboard on Cardiff’s main shopping street, forcing it to display a series of swastikas and far-right images.

The billboard on Queen Street, Cardiff, appears to have been compromised after a hacker grabbed its TeamViewer login credentials and locked out its genuine operator, BlowUP Media which manages electronic advertising displays across Europe.

Images of the billboard were posted on the /pol/ “Politically Incorrect” messageboard on 4chan, who found it all very amusing - much to the bafflement of the rest of us.

The offending screen was switched off at midnight, a spokesperson for Cardiff Council told Wales Online, but only after a number of concerned shoppers contacted local police.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that hackers have displayed obscene images on electronic billboards - and they have even f**ked around with road signs in the past.

About the author, Graham Cluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy.

5 Responses

Actually, this one was because the controller accidentally showed the TeamViewer password on the screen. This one was caused by human error, the hardest computer problem to fix. Actually, people are probably the largest computer security threat there is: we can be fooled easily, we can be gullible, we can be dumb, et cetera. The easiest way to make a computer safer is to limit the amount of chances that people have to screw everything up. For example, here: if an automated script chose what it showed, not people, then this probably wouldn’t have happened.

In conclusion, people suck. We do. We’re at fault here. It’s the hard truth.

But what can we do about it? First, we should remember that these people mean well: for example, here: it was an innocent mistake. They moved it away, but too late. So, if we can actually predict the ways that people could mess things up, we can teach them not to do that. Seems obvious now, right? Say, if we told them not to put the login info in front of the display image, then they would be more careful about it. Sure, its not a perfect fix, but it would probably have prevented this here.

Another thing: businesses shouldn’t leave things like this up to chance. This, in retrospect, seems like it should have been foreseen. But, obviously it wasn’t.

So in conclusion ” the same explanation: lousy security.” is still correct.
Security is 100% a human concern, because none of the expensive, innovative, advanced security technology does anything without the human factor properly installing, maintaining, and applying these security measures, which includes not protecting passwords.

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